The CIA, the drug dealers, and the tragedy of Gary Webb
The CIA, the drug dealers, and the tragedy of Gary Webb
In 1996, journalist Gary Webb began looking into links between Nicaragua's drug-running Contra rebels and the CIA. As a recent film shows, what he found killed him
By Alex Hannaford
6:18PM GMT 21 Mar 2015
Gary Webb knew his story would cause a stir. The newspaper report he'd written suggested that a US-backed rebel army in Latin America was supplying the drugs responsible for blighting some of Los Angeles's poorest neighbourhoods – and, crucially, that the CIA must have known about it.
Dark Alliance was a series written by California-based reporter Webb and published in the San Jose Mercury News in 1996. In it, he claimed the Contra rebels in Nicaragua were shipping cocaine into the US. which was then flooding Compton and South-Central Los Angeles in the mid-Eighties after being turned into crack – a relatively new and highly addictive substance sold in 'rocks' that could be smoked. Webb also said the CIA was aware that proceeds from the sales of those drugs were being funnelled back to help fund the Contras.
Dark Alliance has been called one of the most explosive and controversial exposés in American journalism, and was the first investigative story to "go viral". Webb didn't anticipate some of this, but he wasn't prepared for the level of uproar it would cause in LA’s black communities, incredulous that their own government could in some way be responsible for the crack epidemic plaguing their homes; that it would force the US government on the PR defensive; that the mainstream press, scooped by a tiny upstart, would attack Webb rather than try to dig deeper into the scandal they uncovered; or that the fallout would eventually lead to Webb taking his own life.
Nineteen years on, the story of Webb’s investigation and its aftermath has been given the full Hollywood treatment. Kill the Messenger, based on his account of what happened and a book of the same name about the saga by journalist Nick Schou was recently released in cinemas. And with it, some believe, came the full vindication that Webb deserves.
More:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/11485819/kill-messenger-gary-webb-true-story.html
